The 4 P’s of Social Media

As marketers, we have all heard about the 4 P’s of marketing (price, promotion, product, place). These 4 factors that make up the traditional marketing mix are what help ensure consumers notice and pay attention to a specific product or service.
Social media, on the other hand, is a relatively new phenomenon in the marketing field’s long history. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have only been around for a little over a decade.
Despite their infancy, social media is fast becoming one of the primary channel marketers are using to promote their products and services to consumers.
As a result, this blog attempts to blend the old with the new in terms of traditional marketing concepts. Namely, the argument that like the traditional 4 P’s of the marketing mix, there are also 4 P’s relating to social media.
Post
Social media’s #1 activity and the reason for its existence. Posting blogs, pictures, comments, or questions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for example, helps to ensure that new content is consistently being added to the site. It also helps create an addictive atmosphere were users will keep returning to their favourite sites to see what they might have missed.
As a result, marketers are constantly finding new and innovative ways to post content relating to their products or services that they feel people will want to pay attention to and pass on to others. Having a social media presence is so important in both your professional and personal lives. Most businesses have either joined the social media revolution or are not far behind. Being able to stay in front of your customers is essential for marketers, so it stands to reason that spending time on social media is a must.
In today day and age, you are either posting or perishing!
Photos
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and in the case of social media, visuals are king. In fact, it has been proven that social media posts containing a photograph or image will stand a better chance of being shared and viewed by customers than posts without photos.
Marketers should focus on stockpiling photos for their social media posts. Whether that is through online programs and tools such as Piktochart and Canvas or through your own photography equipment, marketers should dig down and find their inner artist in order to showcase their products or services in the best possible light.
Personality
Social media provides users with the opportunity to showcase their unique and individual brand. For a company’s social media pages, it allows marketers to show their customers what type of company they represent.
Showing that your company is fun, light-hearted, and carefree while also demonstrating knowledge surrounding their respective industry helps endear the company to the consumers. Posting fun facts, daily news, and weekly jokes can help create an interactive and expectant audience with users tuning in frequently to see what your company has to say next.
Performance
Like every marketing channel or tool, a company’s performance on social media needs to be studied and quantified. From a business perspective, marketers will want to concentrate the majority of their time on sites that are proving to be attracting lots of activity. Customers never want to feel as though you have abandoned them. Having the knowledge that your Facebook page might be doing better than your Instagram page, for example, will allow you to satisfy your customers and ensure your return on investment is paying off.
Overall, social media is a prolific and profitable avenue that, when done correctly, marketers can harness to their satisfaction. Understanding the 4 P’s of social media provides an overview on some of the areas that marketers should concentrate on in order to build their professional or personal brand reputations.
Courtney Rosebush is a marketing and sales professional in Toronto. With a passion for social media marketing, research, and blogging, Courtney seeks to educate visitors on the importance of marketing in both business and everyday life by creating fun and engaging content to share with others. In her spare time, she is having adventures in the form of reading a bestseller, trying a new restaurant, going to the theatre, or spending hours in a coffee shop. Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.